Harold hesitated a moment, and then replied: 

’I don’t know, but it seems to me I love you as much as a man could ever love another.’

’Phoo!  Of course you do; but that’s boy love; that isn’t like when you are old enough to have a beau!’ and Jerry laughed merrily, as she sprang up, and, taking Harold’s rake, began to toss the hay about rapidly, bidding him sit still and see how fast she could work in his place.

Harold was very tired, and his head was aching badly, so for a time he sat still, watching the graceful movements of the beautiful child, who, it seemed to him, was slipping away from him.  Constant intercourse with a polished man like Arthur Tracy had not been without its effect upon her, and there was about her an air which with strangers would have placed her at once above the ordinary level of simple country girls.  This Harold had been the first to detect, and though he rejoiced at Jerry’s good fortune, there was always with him a dread lest she should grow beyond him, and that he should lose the girl he loved so much.

’What if she should think me a clown and a clodhopper, as Tom Tracy does?’ he said to himself, as he watched her raking up the hay faster, and quite as well as he could have done himself.  ’I believe I should want to die.’

It was impossible that Jerry should have guessed the nature of Harold’s thoughts, but once, as she passed near him, she dropped her rake, and going up to him, wiped his forehead with her apron, and, kissing him fondly, said to him: 

’Poor, tired boy, is your head awful?  You look as if you wanted to vomit?  Do you?’

‘No, Jerry,’ Harold answered, laughingly.  ’I am not as bad as that.  I was only thinking and wishing that I were rich and could sometime give you and grandma a home as handsome as Tracy Park.  How would you like it?’

‘First-rate, if you were there,’ Jerry replied; ’but if you were not I shouldn’t like it at all.  I never mean to live anywhere without you; because, you know, I am your little girl, the one you found in the carpet-bag, and I love you more than all the world, and will love and stand by you forever and ever, amen!’

She said the last so abruptly, and it sounded so oddly, that Harold burst into a laugh, and taking up the rake she had dropped, began his work again, declaring that the headache was gone, and that he was a great deal better.

‘Forever and ever, amen!’ The words kept repeating themselves over and over in Harold’s mind as he walked homeward in the gathering twilight with Jerry hip-pi-ty-hopping at his side, her hand in his, and her tongue running rapidly, as it usually did when with him.

She would ‘love and stand by him forever and ever, amen!’ It was a singular remark for a child, and in after years, when his sky was the blackest, the words would come back to the man Harold like so many stabs as he whispered in his anguish: 

‘She has forgotten her promise to “stand by me forever and ever, amen!"’